“Locals” by James Lasdun

They peopled landscapes casually like trees,
being there richly, never having gone there,
and whether clanning in cities or village-thin stands
were reticent as trees with those not born there,
and their fate, like trees, was seldom in their hands.

Others to them were always one of two
evils: the colonist or refugee.
They stared back, half-disdaining us, half-fearing;
inferring from our looks their destiny
as preservation or as clearing.

I envied them. To be local was to know
which team to support: the local team;
where to drop in for a pint with mates: the local;
best of all to feel by birthright welcome
anywhere; be everywhere a local …

Bedouin-Brython-Algonquins; always there
before you; the original prior claim
that made your being anywhere intrusive.
There, doubtless, in Eden before Adam
wiped them out and settled in with Eve.

Whether at home or away, whether kids
playing or saying what they wanted,
or adults chatting, waiting for a bus,
or, in their well-tended graves, the contented dead,
there were always locals, and they were never us.

(From Landscape with Chainsaw, 2001.)

“Sonnet XVI: To the Lord General Cromwell” by John Milton

Cromwell, our chief of men, who through a cloud
Not of war only, but detractions rude,
Guided by faith and matchless fortitude,
To peace and truth thy glorious way hast plough’d,

And on the neck of crowned Fortune proud
Hast rear’d God’s trophies, and his work pursu’d,
While Darwen stream with blood of Scots imbru’d,
And Dunbar field, resounds thy praises loud,

And Worcester’s laureate wreath; yet much remains
To conquer still: peace hath her victories
No less renown’d than war. New foes arise

Threat’ning to bind our souls with secular chains:
Help us to save free Conscience from the paw
Of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw.

John Milton is 400 years old this year, eternally speaking, and Stanley Fish writes about why Milton is such a superior poet.  It is important to note, while reading Fish’s encomium, that Milton was a Puritan.

Rather than being employed for its own sake, [Milton’s] poetry is always in the service of ideas and moral commitments, and it is always demanding that its readers measure themselves against the judgments it repeatedly makes - judgments about the nature of virtue, about the proper mode of civil and domestic behavior, about the true shape of heroism, about the self-parodying bluster of military action, about the criteria of aesthetic excellence, about the uses of leisure, about one’s duties to man and God, about the scope and limitations of reason, about the primacy of faith, about everything.

Of course, the quality of his work transcended merely Puritan concerns, which is what makes it so lasting, and some to which all Christian writers should aspire.  You can read some of his poems here, and I’ll post one in just a few minutes.

Everybody, inside and outside the academy, seems to acknowledge the fact that college students and graduates cannot write very well.  The problem here is not just that they’ve spent anywhere between $50,000 and $200,000 to learn how to do it, among other things.  The other problem is that almost all of us have to write in our work, and when our writing is bad, we look like idiots.  We have to write emails, we write presentations, we write memos and handouts for meetings, we write résumés, we write cover letters, we write proposals, we write letters to colleagues.  A few spelling or grammatical errors can be forgiven - its for it’s, for example - but the truth is, and I always tell my writing students this: when you make a spelling or grammar mistake that your reader usually doesn’t make, your reader will consider himself more intelligent than you.  This doesn’t help your reputation at work.  And when you make a style or composition mistake - e.g., incomprehensible transitions, an abrupt conclusion, forgetting to state your point as early as possible - your reader just walks away thinking you don’t make sense, or don’t make it very well. So, as a group, students and graduates can’t write, but they need to.  William Major, an English professor, says much of the blame really does fall with English professors.  Because as a group, they idolize the teaching of literary theory and laugh at the teaching of writing.  They make all the graduate students and part-timers do it.

The English professor rarely teaches freshman writing courses because it is beneath her to have to worry over catchy introductions, pithy thesis statements, and thoughtful conclusions. Certainly she cannot be bothered by grammar and form, except briefly and in passing. There is a workman-like quality to the teaching of writing; it is as close to blue-collar as you can get in the liberal arts classroom. In my first tenure-track job at a community college I taught a five and five load, four of which were composition classes (far too many, to be sure). I felt like Lucy in the candy factory. We’re English professors; why work up a sweat?

Richard Weaver, author of Ideas Have Consequences and English professor at the University of Chicago, insisted on teaching freshman writing courses.  Would that all lauded professors would stoop so low.  Maybe America’s college students would appreciate writing if they could tell that their most talented professors did, too.

“The Logical Vegetarian” by G.K. Chesterton

You will find me drinking rum,
Like a sailor in a slum,
You will find me drinking beer like a Bavarian
You will find me drinking gin
In the lowest kind of inn
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

So I cleared the inn of wine,
And I tried to climb the sign,
And I tried to hail the constable as “Marion.”
But he said I couldn’t speak,
And he bowled me to the Beak
Because I was a Happy Vegetarian.

Oh, I know a Doctor Gluck,
And his nose it had a hook,
And his attitudes were anything but Aryan;
So I gave him all the pork
That I had, upon a fork
Because I am myself a Vegetarian.

I am silent in the Club,
I am silent in the pub.,
I am silent on a bally peak in Darien;
For I stuff away for life
Shoving peas in with a knife,
Because I am a rigid Vegetarian.

No more the milk of cows
Shall pollute my private house
Than the milk of the wild mares of the Barbarian
I will stick to port and sherry,
For they are so very, very,
So very, very, very, Vegetarian.

“Songs of Education: For the Creche” by G.K. Chesterton

Form 8277059, Sub-Section K

I remember my mother, the day that we met,
A thing I shall never entirely forget;
And I toy with the fancy that, young as I am,
I should know her again if we met in a tram.
But mother is happy in turning a crank
That increases the balance in somebody’s bank;
And I feel satisfaction that mother is free
From the sinister task of attending to me.

They have brightened our room, that is spacious and cool,
With diagrams used in the Idiot School,
And Books for the Blind that will teach us to see;
But mother is happy, for mother is free.
For mother is dancing up forty-eight floors,
For love of the Leeds International Stores,
And the flame of that faith might perhaps have grown cold,
With the care of a baby of seven weeks old.

For mother is happy in greasing a wheel
For somebody else, who is cornering Steel;
And though our one meeting was not very long,
She took the occasion to sing me this song:
“O, hush thee, my baby, the time will soon come
When thy sleep will be broken with hooting and hum;
There are handles want turning and turning all day,
And knobs to be pressed in the usual way;

O, hush thee, my baby, take rest while I croon,
For Progress comes early, and Freedom too soon.”

“The Lowering” by May Swenson

Arlington Cemetery
June 8, 1968

The flag is folded
lengthwise, and lengthwise again,
folding toward the open edge,
so that the union of stars on the blue
field remains outward in full view;
a triangular folding is then begun
at the striped end,
by bringing the corner of the folded edge
to the open edge;
the outer point, turned inward along the open edge,
forms the next triangular fold:
the folding continued so, until the end is reached,
the final corner tucked between
the folds of the blue union,
the form of the folded flag is found to resemble that
of a 3-cornered pouch, or thick cocked hat.

Take this flag, John Glenn, instead of a friend;
instead of a brother, Edward Kennedy, take this flag;
instead of a father, Joe Kennedy, take this flag;
this flag instead of a husband, Ethel Kennedy, take this flag;
this 9-times-folded red-white-striped, star-spotted-blue flag,
tucked and pocketed neatly,
Nation, instead of a leader, take this folded flag.
Robert Kennedy, coffin without coverlet,
beside this hole in the grass,
beside your brother, John Kennedy,
in the grass,
take, instead of a country,
this folded flag;
Robert Kennedy, take this
hole in the grass.

(from New and Selected Things Taking Place, 1978)

We pick on J.K. Rowling a lot here, or at least we have in the past.  Not for anything she’s done, of course, but instead to rib her readers for their passion, insisting as they do that her books are, like, so readable.  Which they are, I imagine.  Anyhow, Rowling delivered the commencement address at Harvard University a few weeks ago, and she had some pretty terrific things to say in it.  Take this excerpt:

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

Now, that’s an author I can like.

Phi Beta Cons, in a post about this article, reminds us of the virtues wrought in a soul by spending time with the great works of Western Civilization.  The article compares Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Frederick Douglass, and how their experiences reading the great works of the West was vital to their discovering a better way of life.  One, from Muslim Africa.  Another, up from slavery.

[F]reedom does not float on the ether, but is conveyed through cultural forms. Neither [Hirsi Ali nor Douglass] read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Neither was inspired by abstract ideals of freedom and equality but rather through the concrete embodiment of these ideals in literature.

The post, and the article are worth reading.

Reading this article at Slate made me think of this much older, and much more educational, article by George Orwell.  The Slate article references popular “catchphrases” in American culture (also called, by people who like the English language, “metaphors”) and how the get born and how they die.  I hear one particular catchphrase all the time on reality shows, and it makes me want to hurt people: “Step up to the plate.”  As in, “Johnny needs to step up to the plate and __________ or he’s going to get voted off!”

Metaphors, once overused to the point where the analogical power of the phrase ceases to suggest anything analogical, become clichés.  The article discusses some others, too, including throwing someone under the bus (another popular reality show phrase), my bad and it’s all good (which are metaphors in a very, very loose sense), and others.  If you use these clichés too much, or if you’re not sure if your conversational metaphors are dead or still alive, you might like to read “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell, the E.B. White of English letters.